Ardour 4.1 released

The Ardour project is pleased to announce the release of 4.1 with
a great line-up of new features such as input gain control, Save
As for projects, click-free changes to processor order and meter
position, relative snapping, faster waveform rendering,
Hi-DPI/Retina support and more! As usual, quite a few bugs have
been mercilessly slayed.﻿Encouragingly, we also have one of our
longest ever contributor lists for this release.

We had hoped to be on a roughly monthly release cycle after the
release of 4.0, but collaborations with other organizations
delayed 4.1 by nearly a month. We hope to release 4.2 before the
end of July.

New Functionality

Input Gain Control

Ardour's mixer now includes an input gain control.
In tracks, it is positioned after the signal flow to/from
disk, and so affects the signal heard both when recording
and during playback. It can be found in the mixer strip,
near the top (honoring the top-to-bottom visual and signal
flow).

Playback- or Capture-only device support for ALSA & Coreaudio

It is now possible to use Ardour's native audio/midi
backends for Linux and OS X with devices that only provide
playback or capture, but not both. This can be useful, for
example, when editing using a pair of USB headphones, where
recording is not required.

Save As

Ardour finally offers "real Save As", which will allow you to
save the current session to a new location on disk. Several
options are available, notably whether or not to copy all the
audio/MIDI files to the new location or share them with the
existing session. It is also possible to create an empty
version of the current session this way. "Rename" now also
works more reliably.

The operation named "Save As" in previous versions has
been retitled "Snapshot (& switch to new
version)". Regular snapshotting continues to be available
as "Snapshot (& keep working on current version)"

Windows assembler metering support.

Metering is one of the most CPU-intensive operations done
by Ardour, second only to running plugins. On Linux and OS X,
this has been done using hand-written assembler code (more or
less the lowest level of programming language that
exists). Ardour 4.1 now has similar code for Windows, thanks
to Grygorii Zharun of Waves Audio.

Click-free changes to processor order and meter
position

In earlier versions of Ardour, reordering plugins or
changing the metering position would often cause a click in
the audio. This is no longer the case.

User Interface Changes

Waveform rendering

Waveform rendering has been dramatically sped up. In
addition, the user interface no longer waits for the images of
waveforms to be drawn, but can continue operations while they
are generated in the background. This dramatically speeds up
scrolling, both vertically and horizontally, though you may
see brief intervals of time when specific regions are shown
without a waveform. It will appear very quickly, normally
just a fraction of a second.

Stationary playhead option

Activated via the main menu's Transport submenu..

Layering: later is higher

Ardour 2 contained several different models for layering
overlapping regions, which Ardour 3 simplified down to just
one, most easily termed "manual layering". Ardour 4.1 sees
the return of one of the additional layering modes, "later is
higher", which puts regions with later start positions
higher. No layering model is perfect for every workflow, but
we hope that the return of this one will be useful for many
relatively common ways of working.

hi-DPI support, part one

People on all platforms with high resolution displays
(e.g. Retina on OS X) will now find far fewer "ugly" icons
and text in the user interface. The support will scale up to
any sized display.

hi-DPI support, part two

Linux and Windows users have always been able to use the
font-scaling control to scale almost a lot of the GUI to
their own personal preference. This has now been extended
by making many elements of the GUI size themselves using
the chosen font size as a reference, rather than absolute
pixels, allowing it to work as you would expect even on
hi-DPI displays.

OS X users with Retina don't have this option, but the GUI
will still automatically display appropriately for their
hi-DPI display.

Relative snap

this makes it possible to move objects around without
changing their relationship to the grid. It is activated by
using a keyboard modifier while dragging, which defaults to:
Linux/Windows: Alt-Window OS
X: Shift-Option. The modifier can be changed in
the Preferences dialog (User Interaction tab)

X-run counter in status bar

For those who don't know, "x-run" is a term that stands
for "overrun or underrun", which describes a condition where
the computer fails to keep up with the flow of information
required by the audio interface. An overrun is where the
computer fails to read incoming audio fast enough; an
underrun is where the computer fails to deliver audio fast
enough. You should ideally never see any x-runs on a properly
configured system, but we don't all live in an ideal world.

Plugin parameter reset button

In a generic plugin GUI, Ardour now shows a button
that will reset all plugin parameters back to their default
value (as best as the default can be determined).

Allow deletion of MIDI Program Changes using
the Delete key

Peak meters now have sample-accurate fall-off, no visual jitter

Automation-lane log-scale parameter support

New 0dBFS peak meter

The existing default peak meters in Ardour max out at
+6dBFS. Ardour 4.1 contains an optional new peak meter that
maxes out at 0dBFS which makes better use of screen real
estate when recording live material that can never go above
0dBFS by definition.

Tap tempo

When editing or adding a tempo, the dialog now offers the
chance to tap the tempo you want to use.

Remove time

This editing operation removes silence and audio from the
edit point, and then moves later material earlier. It can
optionally move markers, tempo and meter points etc. as well.